'Eden - it's where your life began, Madeleine. It's a place where the current of life runs stronger than anywhere else. In Eden the sun shines more fiercely, the rain strikes harder, and the trees are so green that it hurts your eyes. Eden is beauty and ugliness and joy and madness and decay. Beneath the great old silk-cotton tree, where the orchids and lianas hang right down to the ground, and the fireflies glitter like spangles from dusk till dawn...' Madeleine is left to bring up her younger sister in a remote cottage on the west coast of Scotland after her mother, Rose, has died in childbirth. Tainted by the discovery that she is illegitimate, Madeleine is plunged into poverty in London before marrying out of desperation a wealthy cousin of her father's, who does not know her true identity. And thus she comes to live at the old family estate of Eden in the hills of Jamaica, often talked about by her mother - a beautiful, decaying house with its overgrown garden, lush sugar plantation and myriads of secrets. Rose had loved Eden more than anything, and now Madeleine has to take her place there.